Traffic Flow Estimation

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Overview

Traffic flow estimation reconstructs current traffic conditions and predicts how vehicles move through roads, intersections, and urban networks. It draws on fixed sensors, vehicle trajectories, cameras, radar, mobile-network data, and aggregated counts, often combining sources when coverage is sparse. Common approaches include statistical and Bayesian models, traffic-flow physics and conservation constraints, graph neural networks and other spatiotemporal models, and optimization or reinforcement learning for origin–destination demand. Methods can perform well on road-sensor and trajectory benchmarks, but reliable transfer across cities and changing conditions remains difficult, as does balancing predictive accuracy with physical consistency, uncertainty estimates, and computational cost.

Latest papers

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51 papers3 papers in the last four weeks, down 62% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Spectral Adaptive Graph Transformer for Efficient and Scalable Traffic Forecasting

    Oct 18, 2026Amirhossein Ghaffari, Susanna Pirttikangas, Ekaterina GilmanSpatiotemporal ForecastingTraffic Flow Estimation

    Future Computing Group, University of Oulu, 90570 Oulu, Finland

  2. Network-Wide Freeway Speed Nowcasting and Forecasting from Sparse Fixed Sensors with a Probe-Supervised Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network

    Oct 15, 2026Ran Tu, Zihao Li, Arash MirzaeiTraffic ForecastingTraffic Flow Estimation

    North Central Texas Council of Governments, Arlington, TX 76011, USA

  3. Real-Time Traffic Density Estimation: A Hybrid Computer Vision and Predictive Machine Learning Pipeline

    Oct 9, 2026Prince Kwabena Appiah BoaduDensity EstimationTraffic Flow Estimation

    Department of Computer Engineering, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana

  4. LTV-CTDNet: Compositional Turning Decomposition for Short-Term Turning-Movement Forecasting

    Sep 27, 2026Md Atiqur Rahman Mallick, Kamrul Hasan, Robert T. WhiteTime Series ForecastingTraffic Flow Estimation

    Graduate Student, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN, 37209 · Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN, 37209 · TSMO Manager Nashville Department of Transportation & Multimodal Infrastructure Nashville, TN 37210

  5. Spatio-temporally complementary feature propagation on graphs for longitudinal AADT estimation

    Sep 24, 2026Linghang Sun, Qishen Zhou, Michail A. Makridis +1Intelligent Transportation SystemsTraffic Flow Estimation

    Institute for Transport Planning and Systems, ETH Zurich, Zurich, 8093, Switzerland · School of Transportation, Jilin University, Changchun, 130012, China

  6. Monitoring Urban Traffic Dynamics at Fine Spatiotemporal Resolution Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing and Deep Learning

    Sep 23, 2026Hao Tian, Heng Cai, Xiaowei Chen +1Intelligent Transportation SystemsTraffic Flow Estimation

    Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77840, USA · Department of Geology and Geophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77840, USA

  7. A Systematic Evaluation of Infrastructure-Based Radar System for Highway Traffic Monitoring

    Sep 22, 2026Tianheng Zhu, Woei-chyi Chang, Alamss Riaz +2Intelligent Transportation SystemsTraffic Flow Estimation

    Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

  8. STHMoE: Hypergraph-Enhanced Heterogeneous Dependency Coordination for LLM-Based Urban Traffic Data Forecasting

    Sep 14, 2026Jiawen Chen, Qi Shao, Yongjian Chang +3Traffic Flow EstimationLLM-Based Time Series Forecasting

    School of Mathematics, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China · School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China · Jiangsu Province Center for Applied Mathematical Sciences, Nanjing 210096, China

  9. A Dynamic Fusion Large Language Model for Traffic Flow Prediction

    Sep 10, 2026Xue Qiu, Jianli XiaoIntelligent Transportation SystemsTraffic Flow Estimation

    School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China

  10. Inferring Urban Mobility Interactions from Aggregated Dynamics

    Sep 7, 2026Yi Wang, Jing Li, Jinliang Deng +5Traffic Flow EstimationProbabilistic Forecasting

    Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China · Centre for Frontier AI Research, Institute of High-Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China. +1

  11. Online Estimation of Dynamic Origin-Destination Matrices Using Reinforcement Learning with Link-Flow Propagation Guidance

    Aug 31, 2026Donggyu Min, Dong-Kyu KimTraffic Flow EstimationCredit Assignment in RL

    Seoul National University Seoul, 08826, South Korea

  12. ButterMamba: Butterworth-Enhanced Spatial-Temporal Mamba for Efficient Traffic Flow Prediction

    Aug 30, 2026Limiao Zhang, Yuhui Lu, Jie Gao +3MambaIntelligent Transportation Systems

    State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology, Anhui University · Institute of Physical Science and Information Technology, Anhui University · School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Shandong University +1

  13. Neighbor-embedded Graph Neural Network-based Crowd Delivery Traffic Management in Smart City

    Aug 23, 2026Kishu Gupta, Deepika Saxena, Ashutosh Kumar Singh +1Intelligent Transportation SystemsTraffic Flow Estimation

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, 80424, Taiwan · Department of Computer Science, VIZJA University, Warsaw, 01-043, Poland · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Aizu, Aizuwakamatsu, 9650006, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan +1

  14. RiskTraf: Risk-Extrapolated Residual Learning for Multi-Variate Traffic Flow Prediction

    Aug 21, 2026Guangyu Wang, Zhidan LiuTraffic ForecastingTraffic Flow Estimation

    Dongbei University of Finance & Economics Dalian, Liaoning, China · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

  15. General Semantic Knowledge Infusion for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Forecasting

    Aug 18, 2026Mattis Thor Straten, Yannick Wolker, Steffen Strohm +3Graph Neural NetworksTraffic Flow Estimation

    Department of Computer Science, Kiel University, Germany · GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany · ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Kiel, Germany

  16. Optimal Scheduling of Road Maintenance Jobs Considering Impact on Traffic Flows

    Aug 14, 2026Charitha Nandepu, Lohitha Kalepu, Gabriele Ciavarella +1Surrogate ModelingTraffic Flow Estimation

  17. Structure-Guided Spatiotemporal Attention Graph Neural Network for Traffic Flow Prediction

    Aug 14, 2026Xuanmian He, Can Li, Wanjing MaTraffic Flow EstimationSpatiotemporal Forecasting

    Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, United States · Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of the Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China

  18. Simulation-Driven Vehicular Traffic Data Augmentation: Extending Sensor Coverage Through Virtual Sensing

    Aug 14, 2026Davide Andrea Guastella, Eladio Montero Porras, Evangelos Pournaras +1Data AugmentationSynthetic Data Augmentation

    Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, LIS, Marseille, France · Machine Learning Group, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium · WEL Research Institute, Wavre, Belgium +1

  19. Data collection from highways: a geometric, class-agnostic approach to embedded vehicle counting

    Aug 7, 2026Lucas Gouveia Omena Lopes, William W. M. Lira, Alexandre M. Lima +1Edge ComputingTraffic Flow Estimation

    Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil

  20. Beyond Lanes: Traffic Flow Dynamics in Disordered Conditions Based on High-Resolution Trajectory Data

    Aug 1, 2026Shrey Agrawal, Gowri Asaithambi, Venkatesan Kanagaraj +3Traffic Flow EstimationTraffic Flow Theory

    Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, 208016, Uttar Pradesh, India · Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, Tirupati, 517619, Andhra Pradesh, India · Technical University of Dresden, Dresden, 01062, Germany

  21. Eliminating Propagation Delay: Attention-Based Spatial-Temporal Fusion Graph Convolution Network for Traffic Flow Prediction

    Jul 27, 2026Jinpeng Chen, Ziyu Yu, Tao Wang +5Intelligent Transportation SystemsTraffic Flow Estimation

    School of Computer Science (National Pilot Software Engineering School), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China · Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications), Ministry of Education, Beijing, China · Department of Automation, School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China +3

  22. Capacity-Aware Deep Learning for Generalizable Traffic Volume Estimation Across Links and Cities

    Jul 27, 2026Léo Hein, Giovanni De Nunzio, Aurélie Pirayre +1Spatial GeneralizationOOD Generalization

    IFPEN, 1 et 4 avenue de Bois-Préau, 92852 Rueil-Malmaison, France · Université Gustave Eiffel, CNRS, LIGM, Marne-la-Vallée, 77454, France · Khalifa University, Math Department, Abu Dhabi, UAE

  23. Transit Destination Inference from Tap-In-Only Bus Smart-Card Data: A Hierarchical Bayesian Approach

    Jul 23, 2026Gefei Zhao, Jiahe Ling, Yuelong SuIntelligent Transportation SystemsTraffic Flow Estimation

    Department of Computer Science University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, 53706 · Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027 · State Key Laboratory of Intelligent GreenVehicle and Mobility Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, 100084

  24. Do We Really Need Transformers for Global Spatial Information Extraction in Traffic Forecasting?

    Jul 14, 2026Qihang Zhang, Siyao Zhang, Letao Kang +3Intelligent Transportation SystemsTraffic Flow Estimation

    School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China · Hangzhou International Innovation Institute, Beihang University, Hangzhou, China · Key Laboratory of Intelligent Transportation Technology and System (Ministry of Education), Beijing, China +2

  25. Unsupervised Detection of Entry and Exit Regions from Vehicle Trajectories for Camera-Agnostic Turning Movement Counts

    Jul 12, 2026Parikshit Singh Rathore, Vishwajeet Pattanaik, Punit RathoreTraffic Flow EstimationUnsupervised Clustering

    Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems (RBCCPS), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, India · Centre for infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning (CiSTUP), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, India

  26. Simulation-Free Estimation of Traffic Flows from Sparse Count Data

    Jun 22, 2026Davide Guastella, Gianluca BontempiIntelligent Transportation SystemsTraffic Flow Estimation

    Aix Marseille University, CNRS, LIS, Marseille, France · Université Libre de Bruxelles, Machine Learning Group, Brussels, Belgium · WEL Research Institute, Wavre, Belgium

  27. An Efficient and Effective Architecture for Large-Scale Traffic Prediction via Geometry-Adaptive Square Partitioning

    Jun 19, 2026Yongfeng Su, Hongwen Li, Zijian Zhang +3Traffic Flow EstimationSpatiotemporal Forecasting

    Zhejiang University, China · Southeast University, China · Aalborg University, Denmark

  28. From Coarse to Fine: Managing Temporal Granularity in Spatio-Temporal Data for Fine-Grained Traffic Prediction

    Jun 8, 2026Shuhao Li, Weidong Yang, Yue Cui +4Traffic Flow EstimationSpatiotemporal Forecasting

    College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai 200082, China · Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group, Cloud Valley, NO.1008 Dengcai Street, Xihu District, Hangzhou 310020, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR 999077, China +1

  29. A Road-Conditioned Traffic Movie Prediction Network with Spatiotemporal and Structure-Consistent Learning

    May 27, 2026Joshua Kofi Asamoah, Blessing Agyei Kyem, Armstrong AboahIntelligent Transportation SystemsTraffic Flow Estimation

    North Dakota State University, 1410 14th Avenue Offerdahl North Building, CIE 201, Fargo, 58102, North Dakota, United States

  30. Selecting New Measurement Locations to Diversify Traffic-Pattern Coverage: A Real-World Evaluation for Total Traffic Volume Estimation

    May 25, 2026Masaaki Inoue, Akifumi Okuno, Shintaro FukushimaIntelligent Transportation SystemsTraffic Flow Estimation

    1TOYOTA Motor Corporation · Institute of Statistical Mathematics · 3The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI +1